“I rejoice in a belief that intellectual light will spring up in the dark corners of the earth, that freedom of inquiry will produce liberality of conduct; that mankind will reverse the absurd position that the many were made for the few...”

Roosevelt? Lincoln? Jefferson?

It was George Washington.

“I think that some of the things (Washington wrote) are as eloquent, as memorable, and as potent as anything that Lincoln ever said,” said UC San Diego composer Roger Reynolds.

“And yet, because Washington never said these things publicly, and they were not in the documents that scholars were likely to happen upon, we don’t know these things.”

For more than three years, Reynolds has been poring over the first president’s letters and personal journals while composing “george WASHINGTON” for the National Symphony Orchestra, which will open its 2013-14 season with Christoph Eschenbach conducting the work’s premiere Oct. 3-5 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Co-commissioned by Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, the University of California Washington Center and the National Symphony, the 24-minute work employs orchestra, multiscreen video, electronics and three narrators, each representing Washington at different stages in his life.

“What I’m trying to do on this piece is not to tell a story, but to allow everybody, including myself, to enter into some kind of imagined, Washingtonian world,” said the Pulitzer-prize winning composer. “When he got up in the morning and rode before sunrise, what did he think? What did he see? What did he feel?

“That’s the goal.”

Sense of occasion

Reynolds, to his very core, is an experimental composer. His highly complex, uncommonly sophisticated music makes considerable demands on the listener, the performers and himself. But he’s also a realist. And as the son of an architect, he’s acutely aware of the context for which he creates his musical structures.

“I’m always looking to challenge myself, but in this piece, I realized that the occasion, the nature of this, is not an experimental occasion,” Reynolds said. “It’s a different kind of occasion.”

The impetus for the commission is the Sept. 27 opening of the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington, located on the grounds of Washington’s estate, Mount Vernon. But just the performance of a rare serious piece inspired by the father of our country and premiered in our nation’s capital by the National Symphony has its own significance.

“If I was writing a work for, let’s say, a more esoteric context, then the forces would be smaller, the demands on the individual performers would be greater and the opportunity to ask more of the listener would be greater,” Reynolds said. “I think I modulate the nature of what I’m doing to the occasion, while always trying to remain really true to myself.”

Reynolds will be asking plenty in his unconventional, even groundbreaking, multimedia, multilayered work.

The three narrators (Clark Young, Thomas Keegan and UC San Diego’s Philip Larson) will be speaking almost constantly, as the text, all in Washington’s own words, is at the center of the work.

Videographer Ross Karre shot extensive video at Mount Vernon and portions of it — like the narration, precisely cued to the orchestral score — will be projected behind the orchestra on three large screens.

The computer generated elements, which Reynolds developed in collaboration with another frequent collaborator, Jaime Oliver, includes sounds that Washington would have heard, whether the chirping of birds or the turning of the gristmill (which Oliver and Reynolds digitally recorded at Mount Vernon).

“The computer cues that come in offer another stream of contextualization having to do with the atmosphere,” said Reynolds. “Both the literal atmosphere, the birds, the chickens, whatever was happening at the Mount Vernon estate, but also the kind of inferential extensions that one imagines the mind internally does. Let’s say there’s some quotidian thing, like a bird cry, and somehow that cry resonates with something that’s in your mind, and it kind of lasts, it goes off into the distance.”

Reynolds’ intent is to create an all-encompassing experience, not unlike a good film, a Wagner opera or life itself.

Political context

As much as those bird cries, part of life in the 21st century is the unceasing, agonizing cries constantly emanated by our elected representatives in the nation’s capital.

“That’s a subject I find deeply disquieting,” Reynolds said. “The basic subject being: Can we actually understand each other and accommodate each other? And the lack of capacity to accommodate has to be related to the lack of capacity to understand, or try to understand. It’s at monumental, doubtless epic, proportions.”

But if we think that Washington lived in some sort of golden age, Reynolds reminds us we are deeply mistaken. Contentious issues of every sort surrounded the founding fathers to an extent Reynolds calls “stupefying.”

But somehow in Washington’s time and with Washington’s guidance, people debated, compromised and resolved their differences. They created not only a nation but a constitution that Washington acknowledged, given the extreme difficulties, was a source of wonder.

Could we come together and make a constitution now?

“There’s no possibility,” Reynolds said. “And what does that mean?”

You won’t find the answer in “george WASHINGTON.”

“It’s not a narrative, it’s not a history in any explicit way and I’m not trying to teach anything,” Reynolds said. “I’m trying to present an opportunity, and what people will make of it, I don’t know.

“But one thing it’s hard to imagine they won’t make of it is that Washington was a more subtle and variegated and perceptive person than they probably realized before.